Speaking to analysts, Apple's chief executive Tim Cook called the company's new Swift programming language "a huge leap forward for the iOS ecosystem" and an important contributing factor to the company's new partnership with IBM targeting enterprise app development.

Cook opened his prepared remarks by noting Apple's "best ever" Worldwide Developer Conference had attracted a new record audience of "20 million people from around the world watching our keynote," where the company introduced Swift alongside iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite.

Referring to Swift as "an innovative new programming language for iOS and OS X," Cook noted that "Swift is the result of the latest research on programming languages, combined with decades of experience building Apple platforms. It makes writing code code interactive and fun, eliminates entire classes of unsafe code, and generates apps that run lightning fast," Cook stated.

"It's easy to learn, allowing even more people to dream big and create whole new categories of apps. We believe our new OS releases combined with Swift will result in a huge leap forward for the Apple ecosystem, and we can't wait to see what developers will create with Yosemite, iOS 8 and Swift."

iOS Everywhere, Swiftly

Cook then described Apple as "extending iOS in even more directions," outlining the company's plans for CarPlay as "a safe and intuitive user interface while driving," HealthKit integration with medical providers and fitness sensor makers, and HomeKit, which Cook described as a way to "control lights, doors, thermostats and other connected devices around the house using Siri."

In the enterprise market, Cook said, "we've forged a relationship with IBM to deliver a new class of mobile business solutions to enterprise customers around the world. We're working together to provide companies access to the power of big data analytics right on every employee's iPhone or iPad.

"Using Swift, we will collaborate to bring over 100 MobileFirst apps to enterprise clients, each addressing a specific industry need or opportunity.

"This is a radical step for enterprise. It opens a large market opportunity for Apple," Cook emphasized. "But more importantly, it's great for productivity and creativity of our enterprise customers."

Cook concluded, "from the pocket, to the car, to the workplace, home and gym, we have a very large vision of what iOS can be and we are incredibly excited about our plans."

App Store growth off the charts

In the question and answer portion of the conference call, Apple's chief financial officer Luca Maestri outlined that Apple's iTunes billings grew 25 percent year over year to reach an all-time high.

Apple has now paid its App Store developers more than $20 billion, the company noted, nearly half of which was paid out over the last 12 months. Cook added that in China, Apple's iTunes software & services, including the App Store is "almost doubling" year over year."Mobile in enterprise is an enormous opportunity" - Tim Cook

Specific to enterprise apps, Cook also reiterated that Apple and IBM both see "mobile in enterprise is an enormous opportunity." He later responded to a question about whether Apple would continue to take a cut of enterprise apps sold through iTunes by stating there were "no plans to change the rules with enterprise."

Cook added that "some enterprises write proprietary apps they do not want to offer to others, and so we obviously have a way for them to distribute those into their enterprise on just the employees they want to. I'm not worried about changing that. We're all for taking friction out of the system, and not adding it.

"Again, the big thing for us is getting the penetration number up," Cook said. "Getting our products, iPhones and iPad and Macs, in more people's hands. And we think there's a big opportunity in enterprise to do that."

Swift... another differentiating technology that will make it even more difficult to compete against Apple. I don't see how Android users can live on this planet and still choose Android. All the cool innovation and manufacturing breakthroughs are happening in Cupertino.

Or is there an "Android Insider" forum chock full of rabid Android fans? And what do they get jacked up about other than how fractured their OS is...

I hadn't thought of the connection between Swift and IBM enterprise apps for iPad, but it seems pretty obvious now that it's pointed out :-)

If Apple can actually meet cook's goal of going from 20 percent enterprise penetration to 60 percent, that would be a pretty big deal.

I too didn't expect there to be a connection between the Swift language and the IBM partnership. I hadn't heard the 20% to 60% numbers before. When did Cook say that? If that is their goal, then that will indeed blow the lid off of sales of iDevices. In fact a 60% penetration of Exxon alone would be worth breaking out the century-old champaign.

That hole out behind Microsoft's Redmond offices needs to be expanded to hold all the Surface Pro 3s. When filled and covered, I understand there will a break dance exhibit done on the mound... that is after Ballmer does his obligatory monkey dance.

Swift... another differentiating technology that will make it even more difficult to compete against Apple. I don't see how Android users can live on this planet and still choose Android. All the cool innovation and manufacturing breakthroughs are happening in Cupertino.

Or is there an "Android Insider" forum chock full of rabid Android fans? And what do they get jacked up about other than how fractured their OS is...

In any good diverse ecosystem there are important niches for bottom-feeders and sucker fish.

Windows OS has - a problem, which was this: most of the people using it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small little files around the desktop, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small little files that were unhappy